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Monday, September 10, 2012

My Favorite Review: Classics Club September Meme

This month’s
meme for The Classics Club is quite interesting. While we are all busy with our reads and reviews, we were
encouraged by the moderators to “socialize” with other members (which, by the
way, had reached 221! Wow..!!) by creating a meme which permit us to promote another
member. This way we can get to know each other, as I think it’s impossible to
read all the reviews or to visit the entire member’s blogs. So, here is the
meme…

Pick a classic someone else in the club has
read from our big review list. Link to their review and offer a quote from
their post describing their reaction to the book. What about their post makes
you excited to read that classic in particular?

Thanks to
The Classics Club blog, I can finally find one review that has made me adding
Toni Morrison’s book ‘Beloved’ to my list recently. Fortunately there is only
one review for Beloved, it’s from Nishita’s blog.

I was instantly
struck by Nishita's review opening:

“What kind of mother cuts her child’s head
off with a hacksaw? A mother who felt she had no alternative, that she was
actually protecting her child from worse fates.”

While book
bloggers cautiously write their review to not revealing any spoilers, this one just
pointed it out in the beginning! But it worked for me, this book caught my
interest at once. I have always thought Beloved is a kind of romance book (lesson:
never judge a book from it’s title!), so reading that spoiler made me curious.
What is this book really about? And after reading the entire review, I just knew
that I must read this one, for I always love books that is rich of humanity
aspects with a slight touch of psychology. This paragraph only strengthened my
decision to pick up this book:

“It’s also hard to
read how an entire race was kept so backward for so long. There is a section
where a newly freed slave is so happy when he receives a coin for helping
somebody load stuff in a van. He walks around with the coin, and is so amazed
that he can go into a shop and buy something with it. It’s just written so
beautifully, and so much from the heart.And that’s why I love this book. The writing
just feels like an outpouring from the heart. You can feel every emotion felt
by Sethe, and the other characters in the story in their own voices.”

15 comments:

That was really a strong opening, but it really caught my interest, too. I really love what Nishita said in that second quote also. Thanks for choosing that title I'm going to add Beloved to my reading list. It is nice meeting other Classic Club members, isn't it.

Thanks Cat! Frankly speaking, I must read that quote twice, because I cant believe I have read it at the first time. But then it intrigued me to go on reading, because there must be a strong reason why a mother did such thing to her child. I might not like the scene in the quote, but I'm interested to learn how that woman can come to that decision.